Mouretsu Pirates Is 75% Baked

Coming into this season I am only looking forward to one show: Mouretsu Pirates. So now that we’ve had the very initial tastes here are just some thoughts.

I’m glad Tatsuo Sato, for the most part, delivered the things I wanted. Or at least, it’s on the menu if it isn’t in the show already. Time will tell if this will be any good, of course. But in the season of judging-book-by-cover I think we’re well ahead of the curve on episode 1. Tatsuo Sato is also the really only reason I’m looking forward to this (but…not Rinne no Lagrange for some reason).

Speaking of judging book by cover (or by Director), I don’t know why so many people gets turned off just by the title and the way how this show tries to lure people in by its protagonist. It’s a little post-Haruhi-ish I suppose, and some people are just allergic to that. If it was only like that. And okay, it’s fine to get hung up on the name. Even if it seems a lot of people get hung up by the name. But dropping the show or not even trying it because of the name? Really? Okay they use the word “Bodacious,” which I suppose may not fit the idea of the show so well (time will tell), but they also used the word Pirate, which, as we will see, is not even correct. But criticizing choice of English words for an anime to this extent? Com’on man.

And one more thing about the names: “uchuu kaizoku” is …probably less of a mouthful than “uchuu privateers” or some equvalent? And I guess everyone knows who is a space pirate. Marika has some high standards to live up to!

The basic premise is that in the age of seafaring colonization, some independent entities were either hired or pardoned by rival governments to rage wars on opposing parties. The word is better used as Privateers. Letter of Marque and all. Copy and paste that into our new SF anime and you get how Marika becomes a “pirate.” But if they are legal pirates then how does it work? That exact question is actually raised within the show when Marika reads up on all this. Seems to me the show might actually, you know, involve this question in its script beyond posing it?

The basic idea of this anime is an anachronism. I mean, don’t we use the concept of “security contractor” for this basic idea nowadays? So I suppose it isn’t a surprise when the show also asks the question about anachronism in a literal sense. Well, it is still surprising because it’s awfully 4th-wall-ish. It was used in the context of how a maid cafe could still exist–I think people who are digging their space pirates probably aren’t digging Akiba maid cafes unless they enjoy maid cafes, an overlap that is probably not as big as some may like. And I think a lot of people get the wrong idea about the show because it was promoted in a way where Marika serves at a maid cafe. Well, Ruri serves in a cat pajama too? LOL. I guess Sato still had an explanation for it, maid outfit or cat outfit alike.

All this is just to say there are a lot of room in the script to flex wit. And I think that is single-handed the best thing that makes Nadesico such an epic and classic SF anime. That self-awareness is signature.

The fundamental mastery of science fiction is the ability to explain things away sufficiently. The key here is sufficiently. A lot of anime adaptations are lazy in this regard, and a few explains the wrong thing too much (think Madoka). Sato’s? They’re top notch and spot on.

Looking at some first impression posts, I see people complaining about pacing. I think those people can DIAF. The pacing is actually pretty solid for a show that has to expand so much effort on world building. If anything I think the pacing is well above-average, compared to shows like Fate/Zero.

16 responses to “Mouretsu Pirates Is 75% Baked”

There’s a lot of room for doing neat things with the background story it seems. At a desperate point in time, the planet resorts to reckless people but nowadays what will that relationship be like? As you say, how does this legal pirate thing really work? Why don’t they just get absorbed into the planet’s regular fleet command?

The confusion with words already begins with Harlock, since he actually seems to have been a real captain (not just “captain” as head of a pirate ship, but “captain” as officer in the space fleet). So “Space Pirate Captain Harlock” has got all the legality-illegality question already in the title..

Bad pacing? Other than the watching her land the beginning, the pacing felt good to me. Seems weird to me when that’s one of the things I’d have put it the plus column. Though I have to say it had me at “It’s time for some pirating,” so it didn’t need to pick me up.

I was going to say that Nisemonogatari was the series I looked forward to most, but then I realized that, when I had the choice, this is the one that I watched first.

I admit to choking on the title. I’ll just call it “Harlock-chan” and be done with it (AnimeKritik noted that the password between the old pirates was the opening line of the Harlock OP — that’s the sort of thing we want from our Sato-directed anime).

When I first encountered the kanji 膨大 it made me think of “bodacious”, and that’s how I remember it.

I think calling privateers legal pirates is fine, but legal pirates are not necessarily just pirates, as in, one is a specific subset of the other (and in fact to a degree that can arguably disqualify them from being the typically defined pirates).

Fundamentally, calling privateers pirates is more of a leap than calling anyone in the show bodacious. Granted we’re just splitting hairs here.

I like this idea of self-awareness, but it doesn’t seem to be… y’know, aware of itself. Especially with the whole gravity/miniskirts thing in the spaceship, the erectronic warfare fought not by humans, but by computers, and all that.

Well, now that I think about it, having miniskirts in zero-gravity is so stupid that I guess it is self-awareness that they play it so straight. Any other anime would have pantyshots flying everywhere, but Mouretsu Pirates is just here telling us how stupid wearing miniskirts in space is.

P.S. Marika in her pirate dress still wears a miniskirt underneath… things like this just can’t not be deliberate!

Because physicists use their time to research the effects of zero-gravity on miniskirts!

Though, I guess since there’s no gravity, the skirt will just perpetually point away from which direction you’re moving because of air resistance – so if you were to ‘descend’ into a tunnel, feet-first, your skirt would just flap up, exposing everything underneath. Obviously, that doesn’t happen, so the only good explanation is that there’s no air in the Odette II! :P

Heaviness isn’t going to help when there’s no gravity! Sure, you could make the skirts more dense, but… their skirts are obviously flowing in the, uh, non-existent wind – which means that they’re made of, y’know, the things that skirts are made of.